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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

The following is a guest blog post by Cristina Dafonte, Marketing Associate of Stericycle Communication Solutionsas part of the Communication Solutions Series of blog posts. Follow and engage with them on Twitter:@StericycleComms
Have you ever heard the story of the person who makes a New Year’s Resolution to exercise more and eat healthy, buys themselves a cool new gadget to stay motivated, a fresh new pair of sneakers, and then has already failed by February? This person is me – in February of 2017, I have fallen victim to every New Year’s Resolution stereotype in existence.

Last week, after eating half of a “family sized” bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and thinking about how frustrated I was that I couldn’t eat healthy for a whole two months, someone gave me a bit of great advice. They told me to write down what I had learned since January.

Lesson 1:

I love Cool Ranch Doritos and I have no self-control over my hand-to-mouth motion when I am around them.

Lesson 2:

Eating half of a family sized bag of Cool Ranch Doritos is guaranteed to make you feel extremely sick.

Lesson 3:

My “stay motivated” gadget is way cooler than I thought.

I bought myself a FitBit Charge 2 so that I could not only monitor the number of steps I took, but also monitor my heart rate while exercising. I had no idea why this was important, but my triathlete boyfriend had a heart rate monitor, so I wanted one too.

After about 1 week with my new FitBit, I was hooked. I was monitoring my heart rate all day, everyday. I wanted to know where my peak heart rate was and how far it was from my resting heart rate. I used the customized “relax” feature on my FitBit, which took me through guided breathing exercises to lower my heart rate. The FitBit also calculates how many hours you sleep and how many calories you burn while running, all based on my heart rate! I was amazed on how much I learned about my body just by watching my heart rate, which led me and my #HIT mind to thinking about how this data could or should be shared with my primary care doctor.

In a recent study by Stanford Medicine, researchers proved how wearables could tell when a person was getting sick. They discuss how healthcare providers can use wearables and the data they collect to help individualize medicine – by establishing a unique “baseline,” providers will easily be able to tell when something is wrong.

The future of healthcare, and personalized medicine, and the interconnectedness of it all is exciting. I know that given the option, I would gladly share my FitBit data with my primary care physician. I trust that something I wear every single day that monitors my activity, sleep, and heart rate knows me better than the doctor I visit once a year. I look forward to the day where this is a reality, and all of this incredible data that wearables are collecting can be used to help advance medicine and enrich patient data.

Learn more about some of the ways Stericycle Communication Solutions is closing the gap between patients and their providers here.

The following is a guest blog post by Cristina Dafonte, Marketing Associate of Stericycle Communication Solutionsas part of the Communication Solutions Series of blog posts. Follow and engage with them on Twitter:@StericycleComms
This year at MGMA 2016, the Stericycle Communication Solutions team had the opportunity to survey over 800 providers about their patient communication strategy. Getting to collect our own data, rather than relying on facts and figures from scholarly articles, was truly invaluable. But what was even more exciting was sitting down and analyzing the results.

Many of the statistics weren’t surprising – nearly 100% of providers are sending appointment reminders, 60% of providers are using technology to send these reminders, and 2/3 of providers surveyed love the idea of online self-scheduling. These statistics all made sense to me… it’s almost 2017, of course providers would prefer to use technology when it comes to their patient communications.

But as I dug more into the numbers, I saw a startling trend:

Only 1 out of 3 providers who “love” online self-scheduling offer it to their patients

While almost all providers are sending appointment reminders, 1/3 are still manually calling their patients

Over 60% of providers are only sending appointment reminders via ONE modality

I started to think about other parts of my life where I booked appointments or used technology to interact with a vendor– did these healthcare numbers match their non-healthcare counterparts?

First I looked to my hair salon. When I go to their website, I have the ability to book an appointment with my current hair dresser directly on their home screen. I get an email reminder the day that I book the appointment with a calendar attachment. The day before the appointment, I get a text reminding me what time my appointment is and whom it is with. Four months after the appointment, I get an email reminding me that it’s time to come in for my next appointment… with a link to book an appointment online. Surprisingly, this didn’t match what I was seeing in my survey data analysis. When I looked at scheduling an appointment to get my car serviced, I saw the same trend – booking was conveniently online, the communications were all automated, and I received more than one reminder.

So why does there seem to be such a difference when it comes to healthcare communication? Our survey shows that providers like the idea of technology, so, I wonder, why are most providers only going halfway? What is it that is holding them back from fully investing in automated patient communications? According to TIME, the average person looks at his or her phone 46 times per day. As we near 2017, shouldn’t we reach and capture patients where they are engaged and spend most of their time – on their mobile devices and computers?

For more MGMA survey results and a sneak peak into how Stericycle Communication Solutions can help you adopt an automated patient communication strategy, download the infographic here.

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